The Doom of Representative Democracy

"In envisioning a new democratic system, we might think we could do better than America's Founding Fathers, and design a liberal democracy with even stronger safeguards against the centralization of power. I suggest that we would be deluding ourselves. In the compromise between hierarchical government and popular sovereignty - which is the defining characteristic of liberal democracy - the tendency toward hierarchical centralization will always eventually win out. The forces pushing toward centralization - both elite pressures and legitimate concerns for efficiency - act relentlessly over time. In the contest between stone and water, the stone, no matter how strong, eventually succumbs to erosion."

"At its best, liberal democracy provides only a very limited version of democracy, and it always goes downhill from there, as regards responsiveness to popular sentiment. If we want to establish genuinely democratic societies, we need to look for models of governance that are not based the delegation of power to hierarchical institutions, and which enable people to participate directly in the process of setting the agendas of their societies."

I believe the criteria that causes modern democracies to suffer from erosion is not that they are "liberal democracies" but that they are "representative democracies". I hope Richard will use that term instead, since it is not the liberal characteristics that cause the erosion of democracy. While todays liberal democracies are representative democracies, they could also be direct democracies and not suffer from erosion.

Yes, I think it is possible to design a system that would be a direct democracy and that would not erode. The people can delegate law making to a legislature and the people can delegate the execution of decisions to an executive government. But they must not delegate the decision making and they must not delegate responsibility.

The people do not need leaders but instead must lead through initiatives and referendum. Initiatives to give binding orders to the executive and legislature and referendum to control and confirm that work of the executive and legislature.

Since in a direct democracy it's the people that make decisions, it would always be the people that decide which issues are put to a referendum. And ministers would lead their ministries and would never attempt to lead the people or make decisions for them.

I believe hierarchical direct democracies can escape erosion if the delegation of responsibility to higher levels always stays reversible. Never delegate the final decision making and never delegate responsibility.

Yes, violence has to be part of the answer: Because in a "real democracy" the people have to be in control of "violence" and not be controlled by "violence".

But it can be a non-violent movement that forces an elite in power to surrender control over violence (because they cannot use it to defend it, otherwise they look like dictators in a banana republic to the rest of the world).

The people are in control of violence if they are the army. The ultimate power is military control and in a real democracy, power is with the sovereign individual. It's probably a dream to think that a society could get away without having a military force (although a very nice one). If the people do not control the army, they will be controlled by one.

To a very small extent, "violence" can be delegated to a professional police force. But any large and important security tasks cannot be delegated in a "real democracy" and have to be taken care of by the people.

Professional armies attract lunatics that will not hesitate to go to war. And they are socially unfair because they lure the economically weak to do the dirty work for an elite. Broad based obligatory militia forces ensure that the army will not be used against the people and, frankly, that it will not be used, period. After all, the best army is one where all the soldiers and officers do not want to be there.

"There are two major reasons why a charismatic leader is not a good approach. The first is vulnerability to assassination. The second is that if we want real democracy, we must learn to take responsibility for our own movement, rather than counting on some white knight to ride to our rescue."

"Based on these kind of considerations, I've come to the conclusion that a successful movement for radical change needs to be based on the same principles that I propose for a democratic society: localism and harmonization."

"Harmonization is about resolving conflicts through respectful dialog.
It is about taking into account everyone's concerns, and coming up with
plans and solutions that deal fairly with all those concerns."

"Localism is about the seat of sovereignty, and the extent of sovereignty, in a democratic society." ... "the local community needs to be the basic sovereign unit in a democratic society."

It's what we here in Switzerland call the two fundamental principals of
"Concordance" and "Subsidiarity"
with power being delegated from the
bottom up towards higher levels where it is (and only where it is)
necessary.

Unfortunately these principals are not being
understood as well anymore and too many mistakes are made where power is
delegated to higher levels too quickly and too unconditionally. Mostly
because the Swiss people are too content with there situation and too
lazy to do the work themselves at the lower level (or too afraid of the
responsibility?).

I'm currently investigating
Aspects again
, looking for a way to wrap Mocha Object inheritance in a more elegant way for inclusion in the new
OpenMocha
code base. Some help will probably come
from this page
.

"Too many of the JS/DHTML toolkits have the "you must use our APIs for everything, including how you manipulate strings" disease. Some are cool, for example
TIBET
, which looks a lot like Smalltalk. Some have real value, e.g.
Oddpost
, which Yahoo! acquired perhaps as much for its DHTML toolkit as for the mail client built on that toolkit."

JS is not going away, so it ought to evolve.

JS does not need to become Java, or C#, or any other language.

JS does need some of its sharp corners rounded safely.

JS should make it trivial to produce or consume a "package" of useful script that presents a consistent interface to consumers, even as its implementation details and new interfaces evolve to better meet existing requirements, and to meet entirely new requirements. In no case should internal methods or properties be exposed by default.

One sharp corner that I would like rounded safely would be to make that methods can be added to the Object and Array prototype without breaking for/in loops. The beauty of Javascript is that additional methods like String.trim() and String.md5() can easily be added to the existing prototype via your own script library. One way to make the same possible for the Array and Object prototypes would be allowing the enumeration to be suppressable on a per property bases...

Since I've shared some thoughts about using Helma as the base for Mocha projects over a year ago, I've ported parts of my existing Mocha Engine to Helma and gained some real world experience with how the two concepts fit together. I learned a lot about "the Helma way" of doing things (I hope), which was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

While I at first implemented things the Mocha way, I often later realized that there already was an elegant Helma way of solving the same problem. For the most part I now appreciate even those aspects of Helma that I originally saw more critical.

As a result of that evolution, the ideas for a Helma based Mocha framework changed quite a lot. First the framework grew to resemble the old Mocha engine, then I experimented with "the Helma way" and trimmed it down until there was hardly any code left. I now started with a new approach ("OpenMocha") that I believe to be an interesting blend between "the Mocha way" and "the Helma way". I'll release a first build as soon as I have the core concept in a working state.

Due to the Ajax-hype and the resulting openness of web developers towards more complex javascript coding, there might be renewed interest in "our way" of building web apps. When I imagine a blend of
Helma
/
OpenMocha
/
Chopper
/
Prototype
, I see the line between server-side and client-side fading and I see "Javascript heaven".

I'm not sure how Gobi fits into this picture, since Gobi is less about putting a framework in Javascripters hands and more about putting the power of Helma in the hands of the Non-Javascripters. Does this interpretation of Gobi make sense?

Helma = the java based core framework --> for "scripting" applications using Javascript
Gobi = high level "web" framework --> for "configuring" solutions through the browser ?
OpenMocha = high level javascript based framework --> for "scripting" solutions using Javascript

This morning I read
here
that Mac Daily News reports that the developer's build of OS X for Intel runs on any standard PC. The second I read this it made CLICK! in my brain... If this is true then that explains why Apple will wait until 2006/2007 to ship "the real thing" - very clever! Spreading Mac OS X like wildfire!

I then followed the links and quickly got where my analysis was shared... The Shape of Days calls it
"Try before you buy?"
:

"The Intel-based Power Macintoshes that Apple is showing at their developer conference are based on an Intel motherboard, generic Intel graphics and off-the-shelf Pentium 4 CPUs."

...they run a build of Mac OS X 10.4.1 that includes Apples bundled iLife 05 suite of applications.

"A reader who for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous just demonstrated to me that the software is, in fact, already available on Internet software piracy sites."

"If I can think through this stuff, Apples management can think through this stuff."

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